NU Kaibigan partnered with Northwestern Dining on Tuesday to celebrate Filipinx American History Month at Sargent dining hall with a full menu of Filipino dishes and traditional desserts.
The special menu featured sweets made by members of Kaibigan, NU’s Philippine-American Student Association and catering from Umaga Bakehouse, a local bakery.
Kaibigan Treasurer Donald Texeria said serving the traditional Filipino dessert halo-halo fulfills the student organization’s goal to educate students on Filipino culture and also reminds him of home.
Halo-halo, a traditional Filipino dessert made from ube ice cream, shaved ice and jelly toppings, is a sweet Texeria said he enjoyed often throughout his childhood.
“I love the dessert, so I’m going to enjoy eating it,” Texeria said. “I enjoy giving it to other people.”
District Executive Chef Demetrios Kyprianos said the NU Dining team spent a week researching and adapting the dinner menu dishes to ensure that they paid homage to Filipino culture.
To replicate certain dishes, he said the team sourced ingredients from Chicago and made recipes from scratch.
“There’s a lot of research that was happening for this menu,” Kyprianos said. “We wanted to stay as authentic as possible. We also created this recipe, this lumpia, super authentic, so we had to bring in specialty ingredients from local markets here in Chicago.”
Kyprianos said the kitchen team also had to consider how to craft dishes that could be served “for the masses.”
Sargent was expected to serve around 1,200 students Tuesday, so he said they had to consider how to execute some recipes on a large scale.
Weinberg freshman Nezar Shakaki said he tried out a wide range of dishes and desserts for dinner.
Shakaki said he appreciated the opportunity to explore a cuisine that he hadn’t tried much before.
“It tasted really different from the food that we usually have here,” Shakaki said. “I thought that was a really good thing because (it) just brings different flavor to what I usually have.”
He said despite having never tried Filipino food, the taste of the pork skewers made him nostalgic for the Arabic food that he cooks and enjoys with his family.
“In Arab culture, we have a lot of meat on skewers, like kebabs,” he said. “That grilled meat is a similar concept, just a different meat, and that’s what reminded me of home.”
In addition to the savory dishes, Kaibigan and Umaga Bakehouse brought dessert. The bakery served pichi pichi, a dessert made from cassava and covered in coconut.
Texeria said coordinating an evening of Filipino dishes and desserts works toward Kaibigan’s mission to bring more Filipino heritage to the forefront of students’ knowledge of Asian American cultures.
“It’s just been our goal as an organization for as long as I remember,” Texeria said. “We want to educate people on Filipino culture and food because it isn’t as popular as other Asian American cultures.”
Compass Group spokesperson Sophia Bamiatzis said NU Dining will continue to partner with cultural student groups to bring authentic dishes to the dining halls.
She said it collaborates with students and local businesses to make the menus as diverse and authentic as possible.
“We know we have a very richly diverse student population on campus, and we really want to make sure that our programming provides the opportunity for our students to celebrate and share their culture,” Bamiatzis said. “We want to make sure that we’re doing that in a way that’s authentic and honors the culture that we’re celebrating.”
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